Birthing Back Our Roots

Yiya Vi Kagingdi Espanola Community Doulas — Hope Logghe

“A farmer and a midwife do the same work. We learned midwife­ry from the corn.” These are the words of Katsi Cook, a Mohawk elder, healer, midwife and environmental health re­searcher who visited the Yiya Vi Kagingdi Espanola Community Doulas at Tewa Women United last year. She was part of a panel of traditional birth work­ers that the program hosted so that the doulas and their networks could gain a better sense of how to bring traditional wisdom into their work in indigenous rural communities. Cook spoke of the importance of birth work as an ele­ment of a sustainable community. She said that this work is not only about the reproduction of individual people; it is also about the reproduction of a culture. She taught us that part of working as a midwife or doula is working inside this complexity, weaving together a circle of people and community so that you can build a practice that rises out of the ground from where you are situated. “In the act of growing corn, you begin to feel about corn like babies that are grow­ing,” Cook explained, and she related the gestational cycle of corn to that of a human gestation, and corn’s structure to the body of a woman, the silks, her ova­ries. The “three sisters”- corn, beans and squash — are symbols of women helping each other and working together, an es­sential element of the birthing process. In any discussion of permaculture and sustainable living, we must bring in a discussion of the way we birth the babies in our communities.

Adding more consciousness to the process of pregnancy, laboring and birth has been the goal of the Yiya Vi Kagingdi Espanola Community Dou­las since its inception in 2008. The doulas have had the fortune of being present for the first breaths of many northern New Mexico babies over these two years. “Yiya Vi Kagingdi” is Tewa for “helper of the mother.” A doula is a non-medical labor sup­port person who provides physical, emotional, informational and spiritual support to a woman and her family. The doula joins the family for the en­tire labor and birth and helps support the new mother as she learns to nurse her baby. She visits with families dur­ing the weeks after the birth, offering them support and encouragement.

The program is a community-based model, which means that the women who work as doulas come from the communities in which they serve. They joined with little experience, and through training and practice working with families, they have become in­credibly skilled lay health workers and essential members of the healthcare team in this community. This group of 10 doulas, who are mostly volunteers, have been on call to families and at­tended births at homes or hospitals, wherever their clients chose to deliver.

Kaleo in a cradleboard

From the first visit, the doula begins to cultivate a relationship with her cli­ent, encouraging questions, discuss­ing the realities of giving birth both to a baby and to herself as a mother. Doulas encourage the building of a healthy attachment relationship be­tween mother and baby during the entire pregnancy, and emphasize the importance of connecting to the baby even before the birth. Doulas attend mothers in asking questions to become informed about her upcoming experi­ence. Doulas teach childbirth classes and prepare moth­ers for breastfeed­ing. Doulas are of­ten the first to arrive when a new mother has a worry or needs an extra set of hands with her new baby.

The doulas have truly made a differ­ence in the outcomes for many local babies. Recently the program received a call from a mother who had sched­uled a Cesarean birth. She had already gone to the hospital and was hooked up to IV’s and monitors, preparing to go in for surgery, when suddenly she realized that her baby was not ready to be born. Her doctor supported her decision to attempt to have the baby naturally, and allowed her to go home, under the condition that she call the doula program and get set up with a doula who could support her. That same day, she came in to the doula pro­gram office for an intake appointment, had a quick childbirth class with a few doulas, and two weeks later had her baby with the support of doulas by her side, and a baby who surely was happy to have some extra time to ripen.

Crystal with Graciela

Another young woman came in to the program with no idea what a doula does. She had heard about the pro­gram from a friend, and at first just thought she would check it out, at the very least to see if the program knew of a place to find an affordable crib. She signed up and was set up with a doula who became a really important mentor for her. They built a relation­ship that was very strong, unlike any this young mother had ever experi­enced, and this mother decided that she would only like her doula to be present for the birth. A year and a half later, this mother who never thought she would breastfeed is still breast­feeding her baby and thinks one day she may become a doula herself and work in early childhood. She describes the bond she feels with her baby as a type of love she has never felt in her life before.

The doulas are doing something tre­mendous for this community. They are tending the seeds, carefully and slowly, from which more and more memory can grow. We are only a few genera­tions away from when the people of this land birthed at home with tradi­tional midwifes by their side. It hasn’t been forgotten but we need help with this process of gaining back what has been pushed aside. In Cook’s optimis­tic words, “We are in a moment of re­covery in our communities.”Just like tending our corn, we must tend these new families, water them with sup­port and encouragement, enrich their soil with a trust in their bodies, so that perhaps one day more of our moth­ers will choose to give birth in the old way, to a generation of those who re­member and are remembered.

Hope Logghe

Hope Logghe is a program coordinator for the Yiya Vi Kagingdi doula program and has attended births as a doula for over two years. She was born at home in rural northern New Mexico and aspires to one day become a midwife and lactation consultant in her community. For more information, visit: www.tewawomenunited.org/aboutdoula.htm

Reprinted by permission of Green Fire Times.  Visit the website at: www.GreenFireTimes.com